Hacker Poll: Is Vertical Experience Important for Your Career?

Last week RedMonk‘s James Governor asked on Twitter: “Software Developers: do you think vertical industry expertise is important to your career?” The responses were interesting. Most seemed to think that vertical experience is important, but a few disagreed. Laurence Hart noted that vertical experience is important for moving into roles other than development. Gareth Rushgrove said yes, but mainly for “taking something that a specific vertical is good at, then applying it to a different vertical.” Simon Brown dissented, saying it wasn’t important “provided you have the ability to pick up what you need.”

What do you think? Is vertical experience important for your career?

The choices in the poll were modeled after the ones in the IBM survey that inspired Governor’s question.

Jeff Ma, the MIT blackjack team member who served as the inspiration for Ben Mezrich’s book Bringing Down the House and the film 21, gave developers at the Atlassian Summit a glimpse of his new stealth startup: TenXer.

We first told you about ElephantDB earlier this year in our article Secrets of BackType’s Data Engineers. But we didn’t link to the GitHub repo, which has been making rounds in the blogosphere for the past couple days.

As a refresher, ElephantDB is an distributed database created by BackType to export data from Hadoop and serve it into…